Sermon preached at Midnight Mass, Saturday 24th December in the Grosvenor Chapel.

“Galli cantant, Angli jubilant, Hispani plangent, Germani ululant, Itali caprizant”

A proverb of French origin current in the 14th century which may be roughly translated as:
The French sing or pipe, the English carol, the Spaniards wail, the Germans howl, the Italians caper”

And these last weeks I have certainly heard enough to testify that indeed the English do carol. Some five, or is it six carol services. Some with the band of the Irish guards, some with the rhythms of the deep south, such as “Sweet little Jesus boy” by Robert MacGimsey; some fresh to me, such as John Rutter’s “Jesus Child” and some specially commissioned, such as Tom Smail’s “The Heart in Waiting”. Carols galore, so that one feels a little “Deep mid-wintered” out.

Which spurs the question, what are these carols, how deeply embedded are they in the Church’s traditions.
And there come surprising answers. For instance that they link with the psalmody of the Old Testament, that the Latin word “carula”, but our carol probably creeps in via the French, is linked with dancing, as David danced before the Lord. Indeed it was the dancing that probably brought some of the prohibitions on carolling in the late middle ages, not that that did much good, fortunately.

Chaucer, Gower, Spenser and Shakespeare all wrote of carols…

“What ladies fairest ben, or best dancing,
Or which of ’hem can carole best or sing"
From The Knight’s Tale.

So the carol and the dance were intimately linked and quite often the songs had dance measures. Ancient dance styles may have been more gymnastic or mimetic. And dancing as part of divine worship abounds in the Old Testament - the 149th psalm; ‘Let the children of Sion be joyful in their King, let them praise his name in the dance’ and then in Psalm 150
Praise him in the cymbals and dances’. We also read in Ecclesiastes “There is a time to weep, and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance” (Ecc 3.4). Perhaps this dancing is now attenuated into our shuffling processions, which are almost the only movements we now find in churches, though I recall having seen a choir sashaying down the aisle with great rhythm in a Baptist Church in Chicago.

One ancient song, which is now embedded in our liturgy, might be technically a carol, that is the Gloria in excelsis which launched our worship tonight.
Of carols familiar to us both Good King Wenceslas and the Holly and the Ivy have a medieval origin.
But it seems that carols really came back with a fresh lease of life into church services in the second half of the 19th century, although Isaac Watts had written “Joy to the World” and Wesley’s “Hark the Herald Angels” were part of the fabric of carols already. “Silent Night” was an Austrian song of 1818 which was included in a Methodist hymn book in 1871.

Many of the carols rehearsed biblical episodes;
While shepherds watched”, “Star of the East”, “We Three kings” come easily to mind, and then we have those which echo the sounds of bells, “Ding Dong Merrily on High.” Some were wassailing songs, and others macaronic, mixing Latin and English in a kind of doggerel as in Mr Wright’s 1847 Songs of Carols:

Eya, Ihesu hodie,
Natus est de Virgine
Blyssed be that Maid Mary,
Born he was of her body
Goddis sone that sytht on hy
Non ex virile semine.

Wright includes some 76 songs in this collection mostly from a MS in the British Museum which includes a delightful song about King Canute from the 11th century:

Merry sang the monks of Ely
As Kenute the king rowed thereby,
Row, knights, row, near the land
And hear we these monks sing."

Of carols and carolling there seems no end, and it is with great delight that this evening began with Carols by Candlelight. And as John Rutter and Tom Smail and Robert MacGimsey add to the huge collection we can feel assured that into the decades ahead there will be always….Angli jubilant! The English carol!